Your Intro To WordPress 5

09/25/2019

Many of you may have noticed a new editor when logging into WordPress. On December 6, 2018 WordPress released a major upgrade known as “Gutenberg” or WordPress 5. This upgrade is the beginning of the future of WordPress, and will be the new standard in a few short years.

WordPress 4 and earlier versions were fully built using PHP Server-Side Language. WordPress 5 (Gutenberg) is based on the popular Javascript framework React. This means Gutenberg is more Javascript based. This addition allows users to update content in real-time instead of waiting on a page reload to see your changes.

A huge portion of WordPress users see the new editor and assume WordPress is broken, and have no clue what’s going on. Because of the misinformation, I would like to take the time to shed some light on this upgrade.

Welcome To Block Based Editing!

The new editor is centered on block based editing, so each block can have their own settings and layout. In a few years, the block editor will be the new standard. Here’s a quick tour of the new editor:

Adding Blocks

Adding content into the Gutenberg Editor requires you to add a block. Keep in mind that in WordPress 5 (Gutenberg) everything is a block. There are a set of basic blocks that are available straight out of the box. Here is a list of blocks located in the common blocks category that can be used for creating a page or post.